tayloredtowriteofficial

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Mood

APRIL 20, 2020. - i am getting used to the online class schedule. studying paradise lost, and writing a paper on shakespeare’s sonnet 138. i love filling the margins with my tiny handwritten notes. 

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For many, Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice, 1812) and Emma Woodhouse (Emma, 1815) represent two opposing ideals of performative femininity. Elizabeth represents the woman who acts in opposition to society’s surface level expectations of women (e.g. talking long, muddy walks), while Emma represents the woman who conforms to the trappings of traditional womanhood (e.g. wearing pretty dresses and matchmaking). However, both women staunchly refuse to marry for the majority of their novels, and both are, more or less, the masters of their own fates. Despite these similarities, Emma is often codified as a bitch, and Elizabeth is given the “not like other girls” treatment in modern culture. These surface-level characterizations derail Jane Austen’s careful portrayal of multi-faceted women and play into the patriarchal pressure for women to be in competition with each other and to appeal to expectations of acceptable womanhood. I firmly believe if Elizabeth and Emma were to meet in 2020, they would drunkenly run into each other in a bathroom at a downtown bar. Emma would sincerely compliment Elizabeth’s outfit, and Elizabeth would use her impeccable character judgement to help Emma swipe through Harriet’s Bumble matches. In this essay, I will—

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“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”

-  Jhumpa Lahiri

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Hi I’m trying to be more active on Tumblr again. In other news, I graduated from SSU and I’m attending grad school in the Fall!

#scholar #study #sonoma state university #grad student #graduate #trying to blog again #english major

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my english major ass: LET’S DO THIS!

my reading assignments: *are up to 50 pages a night of literature theory that i still don’t quite understand*

my english major ass: *crippling self doubt* SOMEONE KILL ME!

i love college ♡

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my favorite thing about the cask of amontillado meme (which I LOVE) is that it displays, yet again, how difficult millennials on the internet are to predict. oh, giant company, you want your advertisement to go viral? well this week the kids are obsessed with a short story written in 1846 good fucking luck

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!!!!!! This is exactly the kind of content I’m here for 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

good call goodreads

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The Yellow Wallpaper

My book, Words of Others, is available here.

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The Last Words Of Famous Writers

When you’ve dedicated your life to words, it’s important to go out eloquently.

Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten.” Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.

Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.” In response to her sister, Cassandra, who was asking her if she wanted anything.

J.M Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”

L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”

Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul.”

Thomas Hobbes: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark,”

Alfred Jarry: “I am dying…please, bring me a toothpick.”

Hunter S. Thompson: “Relax — this won’t hurt.”

Henrik Ibsen: “On the contrary!”

Anton Chekhov: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.”

Mark Twain: “Good bye. If we meet—” Spoken to his daughter Clara.

Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?” Alcott did not have meningitis, though she believed it to be so. She died from mercury poison.

Jean Cocteau: “Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying.”

Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”

Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants…how do the peasants die?”

Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”

Charles Dickens: “On the ground!” He suffered a stroke outside his home and was asking to be laid on the ground.

H.G. Wells: “Go away! I’m all right.” He didn’t know he was dying.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “More light.”

W.C. Fields: “Goddamn the whole fucking world and everyone in it except you, Carlotta!” “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.

Voltaire: “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.” When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.

Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies…I think that’s the record.”

George Bernard Shaw: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Henry David Thoreau: “Moose…Indian.”

James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”

Oscar Wilde: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.” 

Bob Hope: “Surprise me.” He was responding to his wife asking where he wanted to be buried.

Roald Dahl’s last words are commonly believed to be “you know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much!” which are the perfect last words. But, after he appeared to fall unconscious, a nurse injected him with morphine to ease his passing. His actual last words were a whispered “ow, fuck”

Salvador Dali hoped his last words would be “I do not believe in my death,” but instead, they were actually, “Where is my clock?”

Emily Dickinson: “I must go in, the fog is rising.”

#oscar wilde tho

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(June 3, 2018)

In this picture, I am reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at Sonoma State University.  This story is extremely important to me for many reasons, but the top one is that I credit it as the key to recognizing that the boy I was dating at the time was horribly emotionally abusive.  When I first read this story in my English 123 (critical thinking) course at Diablo Valley College, I believed that John was truly doing what he could in order to help his wife through a rough time as my “loving” boyfriend exemplified this exact behavior toward me.  It shocked me when my classmates had drastically different reactions to this brilliantly written piece.  

When I first started dating my “John,” I was quite depressed and the rush of a new relationship with someone whom had been my best friend for three years prior helped to mask the dark cloud that I had carried for months.  Everyone noticed how much happier I was and I finally started “being myself” again after so long.  Unfortunately, I was not “myself,” but a version of my past self that “John” had tweaked ever-so-slightly to be whom he wanted.  I won’t go into the details about the levels and complexities of the abuse, as I would need a novel in order to do that (oh wait, I am doing that...), but I just want to stress that it was extremely bad and one of the worst things that I can ever imagine happening to a person.  It got to the point that after the honeymoon phase of the relationship had ended, my depression was back and worse than ever, but no one noticed that it was “John” who was making it so much worse.  At times, it felt like to only way to leave the situation was through death because I felt so trapped.  

Why am I sharing all of this?  Today marks two years since I ended this relationship and I wanted to share my story.  It is possible to be happy after situations like this, no matter how hard it is to believe in the midst of it all.  Two years ago, I never could have imagined that I would be the woman I am today.  I have come out of my shell and no longer dread the future; I just graduated from Diablo Valley College with my AA in English with a 4.0 GPA and am heading to my dream school for my BA (and hopefully MA in a couple of years) in just two more months.  I have wonderful and amazing friends in my life whom I love dearly, even if I have only known some of them for a semester.  I’ve loved and lost in these past two years, but I’ve grown stronger and I know that majority of pain is temporary; moving on from my “John” was a long, hard battle, but it  helped me to keep my head up during rough times by showing me that I can handle it.  

In a way, I do trail this back to “The Yellow Wallpaper” as it was the first crack in my relationship, which I can parallel to the one in the story as I was suffering from depression -- poorly handled by my partner who thought he knew what was best for me (though he clearly did not).  Two years ago today, I broke free from this ugly confinement and it is time to celebrate my personal Independence Day.

#first post #the yellow wallpaper #charlotte perkins gilman #relationship #abuse #emotional abuse #trigger #trigger warning #tw: abuse #toxic relationship #sonoma #sonoma state university #sonoma state #ssu #transfer student #university #community college #dvc #diablo valley college #english #english major #english tutor #writing #writer #creative writing #literature #writers #writers of tumblr #education #nature